nd breathe a silent prayer for
those who struggle against desperate odds and "the unspeakable Turk,"
and if to-morrow and on the morrow's morrow editors and orators unite
in words of sympathy and encouragement for the patriots fighting in
some Cuba, it is because we believe the love of liberty implies the
right to liberty; that despotism corrupts manhood; that
self-government is the best for industry, the best for integrity, the
best for intelligence. If the red plowshare of war must pass through
the soil of the nations, may it bury forever the seeds of oppression
and injustice, and sow for future generations the seeds of liberty,
intelligence and religion!

Moreover, an overmastering passion is the secret of all eminence in
scholarship. Each autumn the golden gates of learning swing wide to
welcome the thousands who enter our colleges and universities. If it
were possible for each young student to sit down and speak with the
library and laboratory as with a familiar friend, we would hear
wisdom's voice uttering one report: "I love them that love me." None
of those forms of mental wealth called art or science or literature,
enters the mind unasked or stays unurged. All the shelves are heavy
with mental treasure, but only the eager mind may harvest it. Beauty
sleeps in all the quarries, but only the eager chisel wakens it.
Wealth is in every crack and crevice of the soil, but nature forbids
the sluggard to mine it. Those forms of paradise called fame,
position, influence, stand with gates open by day and night, but the
cherubim with flaming swords wave back all idle youth. When the
Grecian king set forth upon his expedition he stayed his golden
chariot at the market-place. Lifting up his voice he forbade any man's
body to enter his chariot whose heart remained behind. Thus the mind
is a chariot that sweeps no unwilling student upward toward those
heights where wisdom and happiness dwell.

To-day our young men and women stand in the midst of arts, vast,
beautiful and useful; they are surrounded by all the facts of man's
marvelous history; they breathe an atmosphere charged with refinement.
But the youth who hates his books might as well be the poor savage
lying on the banks of the Niger, whose soul sits in silence and
starves to death in a silent dungeon. Should a kind heaven give us the
power to select some charmed gift to be dropped down upon our youth,
parents and teachers could ask nothing better than that each youn